Since January of 2005, we've been in the process of redoing and adding on to our Gregory Ain Home in the Mar Vista Tract of Los Angeles. There are 52 Ain homes in this tract which is now a Historical Preservation Overlay Zone (HPOZ). Ours was the model home for Ain's original tract.

About Me

Originally from Oregon, I moved to Los Angeles after attending U of Hawaii, then PSU for Graduate Degrees. I've lived in L.A. since the 70's. I write children's books for kids who have difficulty reading.

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Sunday, July 03, 2005

In The Beginning

Okay, here goes. I'm starting this blog to talk about our Mar Vista Home that we are in the process of fixing up and adding a wing which will include - a family room, master bath, and master bedroom. We finalized our plans at the beginning of January, but it we couldn't go straight to Building and Safety for permits because our home is one of 52 Gregory Ain homes in the Mar Vista Tract that is under the protection and preservation of the city's HPOZ guidelines (historic preservation overlay zone - from now on called HPOZ). If you'd like to know the history of Gregory Ain's Homes please go to http://marvistatract.org/ where you will find pictures, blueprints, original colors and much more.

Anyway, our HPOZ (which is a good thing as it preserves these fragile structures from becoming mansionized) is newly formed with a board, but the guidelines haven't all been created, so we didn't know what to expect at our first meeting with the neighborhood preservation board. Actually, we didn't meet with the board first, we had to go downtown to city hall and meet with the person in city planning assigned to our HPOZ - a woman named Sandi (she's sooooo nice) who consulted with us to make sure we were ready to present our idea/plans to the board. At the time of our meeting with Sandi, we were required to bring a material list which included paint colors(chips of exterior paint as interior of house is not governed by HPOZ rules), stucco finish, fascia paint, window and door color, roofing materials. My husband made up a board with all of the previous things on it including a small rubber piece of roofing material. We also had to take a floor plan, plot plan, elevation plan, window detail plan - all drawn to scale. We did the drawings and luckily there was one only one snag - we hadn't used the right line, dash symbols for the property line. We found the correct symbols for property lines by looking at a friend's remodeling plans, but there are places on the internet that will detail the lines and symbols needed for plot plans etc. Our city planner, Sandi, told us to make the corrections, then schedule a meeting with the HPOZ board. She said we would need 10 copies of everything to present at the meeting. Ten copies! Two copies for the city, one copy for Cultural Affairs, one copy for our city Council woman and five copies would go to each of the five board members and of course, one for us. We redrew the plot plan and off we went to the xerox shop. Over the next couple of months, we would become experts at using the various machines at the copy shop! (We hadn't even started our addition and we were racking up hundreds of dollars in xeroxing - and where, I wonder, have all those copies now gone? Into a dumpster? Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Armed with our sets of plans and materials lists, the package, we made an appointment to see the HPOZ board (most of whom are neighbors that we've known a long time.) In my next post, I'll tell you about that first HPOZ meeting.

The roof, the top covering of a building, is one of the universal structures found on all buildings. Its purpose is primarily to shed water off the building and to prevent it from accumulating on top. To achieve this goal, Roofs may be highly pitched (sloped) or low sloped in form.

Low sloped roofs are commonly found on industrial/commercial type structures. Pitched roofs are the primary design found on residential homes. The most common type of low sloped roof for industrial/commercial structures are the conventional built-up-roof (BUR), modified bitumen, or single plies (EPDM, PVC, TPO). Metal standing seam roofs are becoming increasingly common on low sloped roof assemblies.